Kakikurashi nao furusato no yuki no uchi ni ato koso miene haru wa kinikeri

English Translation

Darkening the sky
still over the old village
in the falling snow
no footprint can be seen there
and yet spring has come at last

Meaning

The sky darkens and the snow goes on falling over the old capital; no footprint shows in it, and yet spring has come.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 4

Headnote: from the time when she presented a fifty-poem sequence.
This is another poem on the first day of spring, following the three that open the anthology. Where those three moved from Yoshino to Ama-no-Kaguyama to a hut in the deep hills, this one takes as its setting an old capital shut in by snow, and speaks of a spring whose arrival cannot be seen. The headnote refers to the presentation of fifty poems to Retired Emperor Go-Toba.
Kunaikyo was a lady-in-waiting and poet in Go-Toba's service, often called Go-Toba-in Kunaikyo. Her dates are not recorded, but she is said to have died at about twenty, and a tradition holds that she ruined her health by throwing herself into her poetry. The Shin Kokin Wakashu is the first anthology to include her, with fifteen poems.
The season is the opening of spring; the place is an old village, meaning a former capital, understood here as the old capital at Yoshino.
The occasion was the set of fifty poems she presented for the poetry contest of old and young poets held in the second month of 1201.
The poem is said to have brought the still very young Kunaikyo to the attention of the court poets. Another poem from the same sequence, on patches of melting snow among the new grass, appears as number 76 of this same book, and its idea of tracks that can still be seen is the mirror of the tracks that cannot be seen here.

The first line means to darken everything about, and in a single word it puts snow clouds across the whole sky.
In the second line the verb carries both senses at once: snow that goes on falling, and a village grown old. It is the same device used in the opening poem of the anthology, and the two answer each other in the sequence.
The fourth line uses an emphatic particle with a negative in the concessive form. The construction closes and then runs on, so that it means: no footprint is to be seen, and yet. The track in question is a human footprint and at the same time the track left by spring's arrival.
The final line repeats the flat declaration of the opening poem. But where Yoshitsune announced spring through visible haze, this poem says the sign has been erased by snow and asserts the season anyway. Its interest lies in naming what cannot be seen.
A related poem by Taikenmon-in no Horikawa in the Senzai Wakashu speaks of spring coming even to a Yoshino village where deep snow has broken off the cliff path.

Author

Kunaikyo

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other